Keeping an Eye on Living Wages

From "Local Economic Peacemaking" from The Wages of Peace

Helping people attain living wage jobs is extraordinarily difficult. First of all, there is no perfect definition of what a living wage is. It will vary based on region and household

status. But you do not have to start a conversation with a perfect definition. Often, lower-income families know their goals for themselves, and you can work through what it would cost to achieve and maintain those goals. But as we’ve discussed in earlier chapters, a good rule of thumb is not spending more than 30 percent of income on rent. Some people like to include utilities, and some want to increase it to 40 percent. To mitigate these pressures, I set the goal as 30 percent of pre-tax income. If the average rent in a community is $1,500, that means a household needs $5,000 per month in pre-tax income. That means earning $60,000 a year, or—dividing by the rule of thumb that a year of full-time work is 2,080 hours—$28.85 per hour. Now, does that wage include benefits? Is the $60,000 attainable with two income earners in the household? Perhaps families in your area have easier access to childcare, personal transportation, or public transportation, which affects these numbers. This is a fluid but productive conversation. Regardless, you are going to end up with a number higher than what most jobs in your area pay. You will either identify $30 an hour as a living wage and realize most jobs pay $18 to $20 an hour, or you will find $15 an hour is a living wage, but most jobs pay $8 to $9 an hour. This chasm can feel daunting. A living wage is not a short-term goal for most people, but it must be the long-term desired outcome. If we stop this work when we have helped someone earn a slightly higher-paying poverty wage, we have accomplished nothing. Maybe some- one is not ready for the strenuous process required to become trained for a living wage job. That’s okay, a slightly higher wage might work for a while. But that is not a permanent solution. We must consider how that person will earn a living wage in a few years. Or perhaps many people in your community are employed, but you cannot find enough living wage jobs in the area to train people for. That’s also okay—and a reason to acknowledge this problem and start working toward a solution.

What we cannot keep doing is being satisfied and helping people attain jobs that do not help them meet the basic needs of their families or households. That will only compound hopelessness and lead to less peaceful outcomes.